


Fear and Hope

by Sholio



Category: The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Friendship, Gen, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26231587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Danny and Jessica battle a creature that feeds on its victims' fear.
Relationships: Jessica Jones & Danny Rand
Comments: 11
Kudos: 50
Collections: Daredevil and Defenders Exchange 2020





	Fear and Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weepingalpacafuneral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingalpacafuneral/gifts).



> You asked for a Danny and Jessica buddy adventure, which sounded absolutely delightful to me! This takes place after Defenders, probably either before Iron Fist season 2 and JJ3, or in some universe where things go a bit differently and those seasons don't happen quite the same.

The last thing Danny expected to see when he answered urgent knocking at the dojo door at two in the afternoon was Jessica Jones, looking disgruntled and uncomfortable and like she very much did not want to be there — normal Jessica, in other words.

"Jessica! Hi! Is something chasing you? Do you need to come in and hide?" Because frankly, it was the most likely of the possible reasons why she might turn up here.

"No," Jessica said shortly. "No. I need —" She stopped.

"... a drink?" Danny suggested after an awkward moment. "Coffee? Cab fare? A warmer coat?"

Jessica had been shaking her head to each suggestion and finally burst out with, "Shut up. I need your ..." She seemed to be having trouble getting it out. "... help."

"Oh!" He was delighted and made an effort not to show it, not very effectively, based on her scowl. "Right now?"

Jessica nodded, having apparently exhausted her supply of words.

"Lemme grab a jacket."

Moments later, he was side by side with her on the sidewalk, skirting frozen puddles and hustling to keep up with her as she strode in the general direction of the nearest subway stop. Jessica walked _fast._

"I thought I'd have to talk you into it," she said. "You haven't even asked what I want you for. It could be a Satanic sacrifice for all you know."

"I was just meditating, that's all. I like helping people." That made her scowl even more, for some reason. "What _do_ you want me for?"

"I'll tell you when we get there. I don't want to prejudice you beforehand."

Well, that sounded kind of ominous and made him even more curious, especially when "here" turned out to be a nice-looking brownstone in a pleasant neighborhood. Jessica didn't knock on the door, and Danny was prepared to put up an argument about picking the lock in broad daylight when he realized she was opening the door with a key.

"Er ... do you _live_ here?" It made him realize he had no idea where Jessica lived; he had always kind of vaguely suspected she slept in her office. This looked nothing like the kind of place he would have expected Jessica to live in, even though all he could see of it so far was a pretty little foyer with polished hardwood floors that Jessica was now tromping on in her slush-covered boots. Danny paused to slip off his shoes with his toes before hurrying after her.

The living room looked even less like Jessica had anything to do with it. Everything was clean and yet a little bit lived-in, with some books scattered around and ... uh ... Danny took in a child's doll on the couch and a gaming console. There wasn't so much as a single empty whiskey bottle anywhere in sight.

"Jessica," he said slowly as she headed for the stairs, "this isn't your house, is it?"

"Would you keep up with me? I don't want to have to explain this twice."

He caught up on the stairs, trying not to step in the puddles she was leaving as her boots shed dirty snow. "Why do you have a key to someone else's house?"

"Because I'm a detective," she said. They were now in an upstairs hallway with two closed bedroom doors. One had glow-in-the-dark stars and posters of planets taped to it. The other had a poster of a colorful unicorn and sparkly pom-poms dangling from the door handle. Jessica opened the pom-pom door very carefully, as if she expected it to explode.

"Jessica," Danny said, feeling weirder and weirder about this. "Why are we going into a little kid's bedroom in someone else's house?" He balked in the doorway, receiving a general impression of pink and sparkles and lots of stuffed ponies watching him accusingly with their button eyes. "Jessica, I feel _really_ weird about this. I need you to tell me what we're doing here."

"I just need you to tell me ..." Jessica huffed out a breath and hesitated, as if even she felt a little uncomfortable with what she was doing, and then she strode across the floor and stopped in front of the closet door, which was white with rainbows painted on it. "Do you feel anything? Other than weird."

"No, mostly just that. Even more now," he added, pointedly.

"Why?" Jessica asked, looking straight at him.

"Because you're trespassing in some little girl's bedroom?" he said in disbelief.

But then he had to stop and think. Because he _did_ feel strange, and not just out of discomfort at being in a stranger's house uninvited. He was edgy. Nervous. He wanted to leave.

"I _knew_ it," Jessica said. She gripped the closet door handle. 

"Don't open that!" Danny said, and then stopped, startled. He wasn't even sure why he'd said that.

"I _thought_ so," Jessica said. She flung the closet door open, and Danny found himself bracing for ... what, he wasn't sure, but he had his hand up and the Iron Fist igniting its warm golden glow before he could stop himself.

Except there was nothing in the closet that shouldn't be in a little kid's closet. There were colorful plastic milk crates full of toys, some little coats and dresses hanging up, and a kiddie-size kitchen play set tucked away behind a big stuffed bear.

"Yeah," Jessica said. She sounded grimly pleased. "There is absolutely nothing in here. But there _is_ something in here. One of _your_ kinds of things. Isn't there?" She sounded accusing, as if he'd put whatever it was in the closet himself.

"What do you mean, my kind of things?"

"You know what I mean." She gestured. "Your kind of weird. Like. Dragons and shit."

Danny came slowly into the room. He was no longer feeling the same kind of intense foreboding, but he was still aware of the edges of it, shivering along his nerves. The rest of the house hadn't felt this way. Just this room.

"And a little kid sleeps here?" he asked, touching the door, kneeling to place his hand on the floor in the closet.

"Yeah." Jessica's flat tone said it all, but after a minute she went on. "Two days ago, her dad hired me. Said he thought someone was scaring his daughter. Maybe his ex-wife's new boyfriend, who's apparently a piece of work. Maybe bullies at school. She's been having night terrors, wakes up screaming ten times a night."

"I don't blame her," Danny murmured, checking the sides of the closet and finding nothing but perfectly ordinary walls. The creepy feeling was dissipating fast, but he still wouldn't have wanted to turn his back on it. "I wouldn't like to sleep in here either."

"Yeah, I know. And we're ..." Jessica made a gesture, as if to encompass all the not-normal about them. "So what is it? You ever see anything like this with the kung fu monks? Please tell me ghosts aren't really a thing."

"I haven't personally met any. Yet." Danny paused, fingertips at the wall's baseboard. "Oh, okay. I know what this is."

"You do?"

"It's a ..." He paused. She wouldn't know it by the words he knew. "I guess you could call it a bogeyman."

"A ... bogeyman."

When it came to making sarcasm positively ooze from every syllable, even Ward had nothing on Jessica.

"Yes."

"That lives in kids' closets."

"Not normally," Danny said. "I think the closet is just where it feels safest. Normally they live in caves."

"Caves."

"Yeah, you know how some caves are super creepy and supposedly haunted? That's because a ..." He paused, trying to think how best to translate it. "A, uh, a fear-eater lives there."

"A what."

"A creature that feeds on fear? It, uh ... it draws strength from negative emotions. Fear, anger, that sort of thing. Fear is the easiest one to induce, so that's what they normally feed on."

Jessica gave him a very Ward-like look. "So it scares kids to get its 2000 calories a day of grade-A child fear." She shook her head and stared at the closet. "Where is it now?"

"Somewhere else in the house, probably. I guess it can feel that we're not afraid of it. That's painful to them."

"How do you know all this?"

"K'un-Lun."

"Figures."

"But they're also relatively easy to get rid of," Danny said. "I mean, if you just want them to leave. You drive them out with, um." He hesitated. Jessica's punches were very painful. "Positive thoughts."

"I regret involving you in this more than words can ever express."

"I know." He gazed up at the ceiling. There was a faint, distant sense of dread, a ball of negative emotions making him tense; it was all too easy to fall back into the way he'd felt when he first came to the city, a tangled ball of anger and grief wound around his soul like barbed wire. "But if we do that, we'll just drive it into some other house in this city. It'll feed on some other child's nightmares, and grow fat and strong."

"Oh good," Jessica said. She smacked her fist into her palm. "What do we do?"

"You're not going to like this."

"I hate you."

"I haven't even said what we need to do yet."

"I know, but I already have a bad feeling about it."

***

At two in the morning, wearing a backpack of occult supplies and feeling very uncomfortably cat-burglar-like, Danny easily scaled the wall of the brownstone and tapped on the window.

It was pushed up from within, and Jessica gave him a hand inside.

The room was dimly lit by a night-light shaped like a glowing pink pony. There was a pale lavender bedspread with a unicorn print covering the bed, and sitting cross-legged on top of that, a small girl in pink pajamas.

"Hi!" the girl said. Jessica put her finger to her lips, and the little girl whispered, "I'm Livvy."

"Hi, Livvy. I'm Danny."

She was about the cutest thing imaginable, with light brown skin and huge dark eyes and her hair up in two little ponytails. Danny immediately wanted to punch a hole in the closet to get that thing out of it ... which was exactly the opposite of a helpful emotion under the current circumstances.

"So what does her dad know about this?" he asked Jessica quietly.

"Nothing," Jessica whispered back. "Her big brother is at a sleepover with a friend, and her dad is ..." There was a fractional hesitation. "Sleeping deeply. He won't wake up, I think."

Danny gave her a look of disbelief. She shrugged. Danny leaned close to her to whisper:

"Did you _drug her dad?"_

Jessica sat on the edge of the unicorn bedspread. "He hired me to find out what was making his little girl cry and have nightmares and not want to sleep in her room. I told him someone might have been terrorizing her by tapping on the window at night, so we're having a sleepover to catch the creeper who's been bothering his little girl." She glared at Danny while he continued to stare at her, and finally whispered back, "Yes, I drugged him. Do you really want Daddy showing up in the middle of us trying to deal with a — B-O-G-E-Y-M-A-N?"

Danny looked at the child, who had flopped on her back and was playing with a stuffed unicorn toy. "Can't we put her somewhere else?"

"No!" the little girl said. She rolled over, eyes wide with fear, and then crawled into Jessica's lap, stuffed unicorn and fluffy pink pajamas and all. Jessica froze, her expression somewhere between flattered and horrified.

Danny grinned at her, and then abandoned her while Jessica mouthed "Help!" He began unpacking his supplies. Both Jessica and the little girl watched in fascination as he laid out braziers and candles and herbs.

"If you set off the fire alarm, there _will_ be consequences," Jessica whispered.

"I'm not, I'm just going to do a cleansing," Danny whispered back, frantically rearranging his plans to account for the existence of smoke detectors, which really weren't a thing in K'un-Lun. He was not about to admit that he had forgotten.

"So you're just going to fill up the place with positive vibes and it'll like ... vanish?"

"That's an incredible oversimplification —"

"So yes, in other words."

"It'll be trapped," Danny whispered. "It can't go anywhere else, so it'll have no choice but to stay here until our happy thoughts can destroy it."

"Until our fucking _what_ —"

"Jessica says you're going to slay the monster in my closet," Livvy whispered, eyes wide.

"That's right, sweetheart, we are absolutely going to do that," Danny told her, and she nodded and snuggled close to Jessica, who held her gingerly, like a poisonous scorpion that had decided to cuddle. "Jessica, isn't there somewhere else she could be?"

"I figured she'd be safer with us."

She was probably right; the fear-eater could go after Livvy or anyone else in the house. Danny arranged incense sticks. "Stay there, Livvy, and don't be afraid no matter what happens. We'll keep you safe." 

The little girl nodded solemnly.

Danny was aware of a growing sense of foreboding and dread; it seemed to emanate from the closet, like a cold front seeping out into the room. It was the sort of feeling that got down inside you and made you feel small and weak ... like a child huddling in the snow, helpless and alone ...

"It's not real," he whispered to himself.

There was a tiny whimper from Livvy. Danny looked up and saw that she was clinging to Jessica, whose face was white and twisted into a scowl.

"Can't we just punch this thing?" Jessica's voice cracked in the middle. "I'm happy to try it."

"It'll just make it stronger," Danny said quietly.

But it was all he could do to stay where he was, when everything in him wanted to retreat — or to lash out in fury, covering up the fear with anger. That had always been his first line of defense. It was better to be angry than scared.

"Danny ..." Jessica murmured.

He hadn't even noticed the golden light starting to seep into the room along with the pink glow of the night-light. Light radiated out from between the bones of his hand, and the fingers had begun to curl without his conscious direction. Grimacing, Danny forced his hand open again, banishing the Fist while his body fought to hold onto it.

"I want both of you to find a positive memory," he said over his shoulder to Jessica and Livvy. "Find a happy place in your mind and hold onto that. The happier the better. What's yours, Livvy?"

"Ummmmm," the girl said. Her wide-eyed stare kept going to the closet.

"A birthday party, maybe? With cake and presents you really liked? Had any good birthdays lately?" His own childhood birthday memories were all tinged with a deep, bittersweet sadness.

Livvy smiled, a bit tremulous, but genuine. "I got Jewel," she said, holding up the stuffed unicorn.

"And cake?" Danny urged. The soft light in the room seemed dimmer, the sense of cold and foreboding growing deeper. He looked at Jessica, whose mouth was set in a grim line, trying to urge her to join in.

Jessica cleared her throat. Her voice was hoarse. "What kind of cake, Livvy?"

"Chocolate," Livvy said. "My favorite. And the icing was _pink!"_

"You too," Danny told Jessica. "Happy memories. I told you that you were gonna hate this."

She met his eyes, her gaze bleak. "What happens if there aren't any?"

Danny's chest wrenched at the emptiness in her eyes. The worst part was, he felt it too, a hollow well of misery opening in his stomach. He hadn't realized the fear-eater would be so strong. "There must be. Aren't there? What about —" He faltered; he didn't even know enough about Jessica to suggest anything. If her childhood had been horrible, telling her to think about birthday parties and cake was only going to make things worse. "What about the Royal Dragon, with all of us?"

"You mean with ninjas bursting in and trying to kill us all." But she sounded a little less broken, less miserable.

"Hey, you got to punch things a lot. You know how you like punching things."

"But you remember how it ended, Danny." Her voice was like a door slamming shut, even as she held Livvy tighter against her side. "You remember what happened to Matt."

God. It was like a hole opened up inside him, any happy thoughts he'd managed to hold onto draining out. Were all their memories like this — small, temporary islands of happiness being swallowed up by a sea of misery and tragedy?

_No, that's what the fear-eater wants you to think. It's lying. That's what it does; it finds ruin and tragedy in even the nicest things to make itself stronger._

"But it was good, though, wasn't it?" he pressed on. "It _is_ good. Even though things end badly sometimes — okay, a lot of times — that doesn't make them any less good when they're good."

"Please stop trying to cheer me up," Jessica said, but there was a hint of sarcastic humor in her voice and he jumped on that.

"I mean, you've got me now, right? And I know you had lunch with Colleen the other day."

"It was work-related —" Jessica began, annoyed.

"And there's Luke too, Luke's great, right? What's the name of your — the blonde woman, your friend with the radio show —"

"Trish," Jessica said, and this time she actually smiled. "She is going to _love_ that you forgot her name. Seriously."

"But you have good memories of her, right?" Jessica's nod was small and reluctant, but it was there. "What about your childhood? When you were Livvy's age? Was it happy?"

Jessica's eyes glimmered and she blinked viciously. _Wrong emotions!_ Danny thought wildly. Also, if he made her cry, Jessica was going to punch him through the ceiling.

"Yes," she said, her voice coming out gravelly. "It was happy."

"Oh. Really?" He brightened. They could do this. They could really do this. "Birthdays and cake? Pony-shaped night-lights?"

This brought a return of the scowl. "I _really_ wasn't a horse girl, Danny."

"Of course you weren't," Danny muttered. He glanced at the closet, aware of the malice seeping out of it like cold molasses. "What _did_ you like, then? What were you into, before all of this?"

Jessica looked like the words were being pulled out of her with pliers, but she followed his gaze to the closet and gritted her teeth and went along with it. "I liked shop class. I used to read a lot. Nancy Drew. Encyclopedia Brown."

Danny broke into a grin. "Encyclopedia Brown! I _loved_ those books." He had forgotten all about them. And he'd never realized that he and Jessica had anything at all in common, other than the whole punching thing. "What about you, Livvy? Do you like books?"

Livvy nodded, a tiny little nod. "Berenstain Bears," she said in a whisper.

"Those are still around?" Jessica said in what sounded like genuine surprise.

"Right? I guess some things never go out of style."

"I notice you're being awfully quiet about _your_ happy place there, Rand." Jessica's scowl deepened. _Wrong emotional direction! No!_ "What's the matter, you don't want to share?"

"No, I just didn't know what to ..." But now, after talking Jessica through her memories, he actually did. Birthdays and cake. Friends. Maybe it really was just islands in a sea of misery, but those were _good_ islands, full of joy. "My mom," he said, and he had to blink back tears now too. "The way she'd hug me. We had a vacation house on the beach ..." Jessica looked exasperated at this, but he didn't really care. Those warm days on the beach, the grittiness of sand, the smell of the sea — the pure idyllic _happiness_ that filled every one of those memories, that was what he had to hold onto now. "My parents. You and Luke and — and Matt." Matt being gone _hurt_ , but in the end Matt had given him trust and a purpose; you had to hold onto people's lives instead of their deaths. "Colleen and Ward and Joy. Doing things like this. Helping people."

He got up. The dragging feeling of misery had almost completely melted away, and the cold feeling in the room was almost gone. Danny marched over to the closet door and flung it open.

There was a sense of movement inside, something sinuous and twisting. Livvy screamed, a high-pitched piercing shriek, and Danny was aware of Jessica jumping up off the bed.

"No! Stay there!"

He reached in between the kid-sized clothes and toys, and felt his hands sink into something soft and yielding, something that struggled and tried to bite him.

Jessica appeared at his elbow, reached past him and grimly grabbed hold of the slippery, struggling creature. Danny still couldn't get a good look at it. There was something not-quite-there about it, as if it was as slippery to look at as it was to hold onto.

"Happy thoughts, Jessica!" he gasped out. He could actually feel it growing stronger and more muscular as they held it.

"Oh for God's sake," Jessica complained, but she must have found something happy to think about, because it collapsed in their grip, writhing and shrinking.

_Birthday parties. Stealing plum wine with Davos, the sharp sweet taste like distilled sunshine. Sparring with Colleen, with sweat glistening on her lean, bare, muscular arms. Ward's first tentative smile at him. Luke's laugh. Jessica, unsmiling, offering him a drink from a thermos of spiked coffee when they met on the rooftops at night._

_The mountain vistas beyond K'un-Lun. The city skyline at night. The stickers on the underside of his father's old desk. The dojo, filled with found and recycled objects that he and Colleen had made their own._

He and Jessica were down on their knees on Livvy's bedroom floor, her arms tangled up with his, her shoulder pressed against him, and there was something small and furry held in their shared grip.

"What in the name of the dragon," Danny muttered.

It was a ball of fur that didn't really seem to have legs, about the size of a half-grown rabbit, fluffy and pink. Danny could feel its heart beating rapidly.

Livvy gave a squeal of pure delight, and at that, the furry thing struggled a little and opened round, dark eyes that made it, if possible, even cuter.

"Oh my gosh," Livvy whispered, eyes round with wonder rather than fear. "It's a real live Jigglypuff."

She tried to take it; Danny and Jessica both made a token attempt to hang on, then met each other's eyes and let go. Livvy cuddled it in her lap, clearly thrilled, as it wiggled a little and blinked up at her.

"Danny," Jessica said, staring at it. "Was that supposed to happen?"

"How'm I supposed to know? I've never seen one before!"

He checked the closet, but there was absolutely no sense of menace, no hint that anything wasn't right. Danny slowly began gathering up his cleansing supplies, keeping a careful eye on the thing in Livvy's lap, but it didn't do anything except snuggle down happily.

"Kid," Jessica said, "maybe you ought to give that thing to us. We can find a nice sanctuary for pastel-colored wildlife or wherever it belongs."

Livvy wrapped her arms around it. "No. I'm going to call her Fluffy."

***

They left Livvy petting her new bogeypuff and trying to feed it M&Ms, which it was happily nibbling off her palm while making a soft purring sound. Danny started to climb back out the window, but Jessica caught him by the collar. "We can leave out the front door, you moron, as long as we're quiet about it."

Outside, Jessica stopped to look up at the window with the pink nightlight.

"So what are the odds it goes back to feeding on nightmares?" she asked quietly.

"I don't think it will. She's mastered it. If it starts to get out of control again, she knows how to get it back in hand."

"Happy thoughts," Jessica said flatly.

"Yeah. I mean, didn't you feel how unhappy it was before? Strong, but sad. All it knew how to do was terrify people so it had something to eat. But it's happy now. Maybe even fear-eaters don't _want_ to eat negative emotions all the time."

"If that's a metaphor for anything, I'm going to punch you into next week."

Danny couldn't help laughing. "No. I'm just saying, I think it's better off now than it was before. And," he added, "nothing that happened in that room goes beyond that room. I get that."

"It better not." Jessica flexed her hands and then shoved them in her pockets. "Well, I guess tomorrow I get to make up some kind of story to tell Livvy's dad that doesn't involve fear monsters and also somehow explains how she got a new pet pink hamster. Maybe I'll just tell him it was his ex's boyfriend after all. The new boyfriend's a creep. He deserves it."

"Sorry, I can't help with that part. I'm not a very good liar." 

"Yeah, I hadn't noticed, _Immortal Iron Fist,"_ Jessica said.

They stopped on the streetcorner. This was where he'd turn to go to Chinatown and she'd go back to her office, but Jessica didn't show any particular sign of walking away yet. Then she said abruptly, "I need to grab something to eat before I go home. There's an all-night cafe around here that's not total shit. Well, no, it _is_ total shit, but it has decent coffee and burgers."

"Coffee's not really my thing," Danny said. "But I could totally eat a burger. Or three."


End file.
